A relentlessly upbeat but necessary story of an important environmental organization.
The 40-year history of the National Resources Defense Council.
In this wholly positive view of NRDC, the authors write from the perspective of John Adams, the co-founder and longtime president. Though to some extent a personal memoir, the book is primarily an institutional history filled with insider details. The organization began as a group of lawyers suing to enforce environmental laws, so effectively that they nicknamed themselves “the shadow EPA.” With time their approach broadened, primarily because of political leaders hostile to environmentalism, who come in for criticism here. The authors repeatedly emphasize the successes that came from negotiating with adversaries, building a membership to provide public pressure and showing companies how environmentally friendly practices can be in their financial interest. Similarly, the issues of concern to NRDC expanded beyond the original focus on “clean water, clean air, a sustainable environment, and the preservation of America’s unique wilderness.” For example, they were instrumental in setting up nuclear-test monitoring stations in the United States and Soviet Union with an eye to promoting disarmament. Despite covering many campaigns and introducing an enormous number of people, the narrative is never dry or repetitive. Today, the authors insist that what “NRDC and the environmental movement ultimately will be remembered for is what we did to deal with the climate crisis.” Some environmentalists have called the authors too optimistic about the eventual resolution of the issue and criticized their willingness to endorse imperfect regulations. In response, they argue that it is more important to get started than to insist on perfection and, with NRDC’s long string of victories behind it, they express confidence of eventual success. The book begins with a foreword by Robert Redford, one of the many celebrities mentioned as major NRDC supporters.
A relentlessly upbeat but necessary story of an important environmental organization.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8118-6535-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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